My wife, Tracy, and I have a years long squabble about Old Glory.

When we bought our home almost 13 years ago, one of my first purchases was an American flag to hang on our front porch.

Tracy and I have argued about that flag ever since.

You may be sure that Tracy is a patriot. She is the descendent of immigrants who came to the United States in the early 20th century. Many of her relatives fought in World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam. This is something she will tell you with pride.

So she loves the flag; she just doesn’t love the one I fly on our house.

Because it is huge.

She’s correct that it’s a little too big to be on our front porch. Sometimes when she is rushing out the door to go to work, the wind whips that big flag up into her face.

“Get a smaller flag!” she says.

“But I like the big flag,” I say. “You can see it from all the way down the street!”

In recent...

I’m a Christian who sometimes has a hard time believing Christianity.

Sometimes, the claims that Christianity makes seem too far out for a reasonable man like me to believe.

Sometimes, things happen that make me doubt that God even exists.

Sometimes, I believe in the existence of God, but I’m so disappointed and hurt that I would rather not have anything to do with God.

What about you?

What are we to do when we feel this way?

The Gospel of John 20:19-31 is a little gift for those times.

The episode takes place on the first Easter. In the Gospel of John, Jesus comes back to life that morning and shows himself to his friend, Mary Magdalene. This version of the story does not have Jesus showing himself to his apprentices until much later that evening.

When he does appear, it is in a house where his apprentices barricade themselves behind locked doors. They are afraid that the...

We have many messiahs in our legends and lore, but no folk singer, historian, or poet ever made a claim about them like the one John makes about Jesus of Nazareth. That “[God] had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God,” (Gospel of John 13:3).

If you believe it, Jesus stands apart from the messiahs of human history as the only Messiah who comes from God and goes to God, who holds all things in his hands.

So what does he choose to do with those hands?

He scrubs toilets.

The verse that comes straight after the grandeur of the Gospel of John 13:3 reads: “[Jesus] got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him,” (Gospel of John 13:4-5).

In those days, people walked everywhere in...

Aren’t you glad you have opposable thumbs (if you have them)?

Try to think of all that you can do with them that you can’t do without them.

What would the world be without the pressure between fingers and thumb?

So it is with the best things in life.

Take marriage for example. It is the “opposable” nature of my relationship with Tracy that makes our life together better than what it would be if we didn’t have each other. The gentle resistance between us makes each of us a better person and, together, makes us a sum greater than its parts.

As the Bible says: “Iron sharpens iron, and one person sharpens the wits of another,” (Book of Proverbs 27:17).

Fingers and opposable thumb. It works for a good, growing-in-love, growing-in-wisdom marriage.

It also works wherever people come together for a purpose that is bigger than each person alone.

It works for the church. The Bible calls...

When I preach, I preach politics.

It is the most Christian thing I can do whenever I answer the call to stand before an audience that wants to hear a word from God.

I recognize that many people in the pews think that politics has no place in the pulpit.

I disagree.

Before I explain, here are two motives that often stand behind the preference for “no politics in preaching.”

The first motive may be most common among church leaders. As in the people who look at attendance and budgets. They want to avoid anything that could split or stir up their congregations. I empathize. I reckon that my own congregation lost some leading families in recent years over politics. When those families left, it hurt the church.

So if I were an elder or minister, I might think twice about saying anything that anyone could take as “political.” Why risk it?

The second motive for “no politics in...

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Our Father in heaven,
Hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
As we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not bring us to the time of trial,
But rescue us from the evil one.

(From the “the Lord’s Prayer” in the Gospel of Matthew 6:9-13)

Your kingdom come.

“We don’t need to pray this anymore because…the kingdom has come!”

So said some teachers in the Christian circles in which I grew up. They meant that the kingdom of God came with the church in Acts 2:37-47.

I’m not here to argue with them if that it what they still believe.

I do believe the kingdom of God gently gestates in the church of Christ, yet I keep praying–with Jesus–for the kingdom to come “as the lightning comes from the east and flashes as far as the west” (Gospel of Matthew...

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[The devil] is always sending errors into the world in pairs – pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse…he relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

I’m thinking of two Christians who are older than me and who once taught me about Christianity when I was young.

Back in those days they impressed me with their devotion to Jesus Christ. You could say that Jesus was always “in their hands” (the way they served people) and “on their lips” (the way they talked about Jesus).

Imagine my confusion and dismay, all these years later, when I find that these two Christians rarely, if ever, demonstrate or speak of Jesus anymore.

Both of them, at one time some of the mildest and tenderest Christians I knew, now use some...

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I think I was in early high school when my dad gave me Rush Limbaugh’s book, The Way Things Ought to Be.

I read the entire book in a weekend. Soon, I was a dittohead.

I embraced the kind of political and social conservatism that I learned from Limbaugh. I embraced the identity of “conservative” to the point that even the Rush Limbaugh neckties I wore announced my conservatism to everyone.

Not only my clothes, but my entertainment, friends and language came from, and fed back into, my identity as a conservative.

Thirty years later, as I look back on that time, I can see that I did and said things because those were the things conservatives were supposed to do and say. In other words, I filtered each choice and each word through the metric of “whether a good conservative would do or say it.”

This made things easy for me for a while. My...

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People who run for office, whether they run for President of the United States or president of student council, make big promises.

When I ran for second grade class president, I think I promised all-day recess.

I won.

Do you think I kept that promise?

Did it matter? Enough second graders believed me to put me in office.

To be clear, I think I thought I could pull it off. I wasn’t trying to fool my fellow second-graders. I just didn’t know that the second grade president had less power than the cartons of milk in the cafeteria!

I’m a fan of U.S. presidential history, so I looked up some of the biggest promises that presidential candidates made (and broke):

In 1928, Herbert Hoover promised “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” A year after he won the White House, the U.S. plunged into the worst economic depression in...